Hockey sticks generally include a blade and an elongated shaft. Many modern hockey sticks are constructed from lightweight, fiber-reinforced composite materials that provide excellent maneuverability and performance, as well as a sleek appearance. The light weight and resilience of modern hockey sticks enables players to propel pucks at high velocities, which results in high-impact loads to the blade. Further, the hockey-stick blade is subjected to impacts from other stick blades and shafts, arena boards, goal posts, skate blades, and so forth. A high performance hockey-stick blade, therefore, must be able to withstand many loads, including impact loads, bending loads, and torsional loads.
As shown in FIG. 1, existing composite hockey-stick blades 5 are typically formed as a sandwich structure including exterior laminates 7 of fiber-reinforced composite materials and an internal core 9 made of a lightweight material, such as foam. Some designs utilize an internal bridge structure to support the faces of the blade, and some designs incorporate a wear barrier along the edge of the blade. When a sandwich structure is bent or twisted, such as when the blade strikes the ice during a shooting motion, stresses along the edges of the blade laminate promote delamination of the composite plies, which may lead to blade failure.
Thus, it is a challenge to design and construct a hockey-stick blade that is strong, sleek, maneuverable, thin, and durable. It is particularly difficult to mold a traditional sandwich-structure blade with well-consolidated plies around the perimeter of the blade. This is largely due to the effort to avoid fiber-pinch-out, which can occur at the edges of the mold when the mold is closed on the blade preform. Indeed, a blade preform is typically slightly smaller than the mold cavity so that when the mold closes, the edges of the mold do not cut or pinch any fibers. If the preform is too small, however, the mold cavity will not be adequately filled, resulting in either a void or a resin-rich area in the blade, either of which yields a weaker blade.